Firefighters cleaning up

"It was one of those nights that is once in a career," said Salt Lake City fire spokesman Scott Freitag.

An extraordinary evening of wildfires burning at nearly every end of the Salt Lake Valley stretched the resources of local fire departments as far as they could possibly go Thursday night.

"I can't recall a time we have been so busy at the same time with so much fire in this valley," Freitag said. "There were times (Thursday) night we had just enough resources to handle everything coming in. If we had had one more incident, we would have had trouble getting to it. At one time, all three of our radio channels had working incidents. I can't recall ever having that."

Mop-up work at some of the remaining hot spots continued Friday.

In addition to the fires in Salt Lake County, there were more than a dozen fires in Utah, Tooele, Davis, Juab, Sanpete and Weber counties Thursday.

A haze of smoke blanketed the Salt Lake Valley from at least four major fires all burning at the same time.

The fire that caused the most problems in Salt Lake County was near Salt Lake City International Airport, where strong and erratic winds fueled a brush fire that started near 700 South and 4800 West about 6:30 p.m. About 80 acres were blackened. The cause of the fire was still being investigated Friday.

The fire forced the closure of I-80 for about two hours. The wind eventually pushed the fire over I-80 and carried it toward the airport.

The situation became very tense at one point while I-80 was closed and the wind changed direction, pushing the flames toward the road.

"We were concerned we were going to lose vehicles," Freitag said. "You could tell in the voices of veteran firefighters this was an extremely dangerous and unpredictable fire. We had to actually open the freeway long enough to get the cars out of there. Those were some very tense moments. (The fire) kept jumping fences and ditches and roads."

The wind also created problems for planes landing at the airport. Three flight attendants on a Delta flight from Oakland, Calif., to Chicago had to be checked in Salt Lake City when severe turbulence tossed them around during landing, causing bumps and bruises, said airport spokeswoman Barbara Gann.

The high winds forced the closure of the airport's western runway for a couple of hours, Gann said.

A total of 17 flights were diverted, landing in either Boise and Twin Falls, Idaho, or Rock Springs, Wyo., until they could return to Salt Lake City and land, she said. The runway was reopened for departures only by 10 p.m. The majority of diverted flights came back about midnight.